Monday, July 30, 2012

"Right Livelihood" is one of the requirements of the
Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path. It is clear, therefore, that there must be such a
thing as Buddhist economics.

Buddhist countries have often stated that they wish to remain
faithful to their heritage. So Burma: "The New Burma sees no conflict
between religious values and economic progress. Spiritual health and material
well-being are not enemies: they are natural allies."[1] Or: "We can
blend successfully the religious and spiritual values of our heritage with the
benefits of modern technology."[2] Or: "We Burmans have a sacred duty
to conform both our dreams and our acts to our faith. This we shall ever
do."[3]

All the same, such countries invariably assume that they can model
their

economic development plans in accordance with modern economics, and
they

call upon modern economists from so-called advanced countries to
advise

them, to formulate the policies to be pursued, and to construct the
grand

design for development, the Five-Year Plan or whatever it may be
called. No

one seems to think that a Buddhist way of life would call for
Buddhist

economics, just as the modern materialist way of life has brought
forth

modern economics.

Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from
a kind

of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of
absolute

and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far
as to

claim that economic laws are as free from "metaphysics"
or "values" as the

law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments
of

methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what
they look

like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.

There is universal agreement that a fundamental source of wealth is
human

labor. Now, the modern economist has been brought up to consider
"labor" or

work as little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view
of the

employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced
to a

minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation.
From the

point of view of the workman, it is a "disutility"; to
work is to make a

sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of

compensation for the sacrifice. Hence the ideal from the point of
view of

the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal
from the

point of view of the employee is to have income without employment.

The consequences of these attitudes both in theory and in practice
are, of

course, extremely far-reaching. If the ideal with regard to work is
to get

rid of it, every method that "reduces the work load" is a
good thing.

The most potent method, short of automation, is the so-called
"division of

labor" and the classical example is the pin factory eulogized
in Adam

Smith's Wealth of Nations. Here it is not a matter of ordinary

specialization, which mankind has practiced from time immemorial,
but of

dividing up every complete process of production into minute parts,
so that

the final product can be produced at great speed without anyone
having had

to contribute more than a totally insignificant and, in most cases,

unskilled movement of his limbs.

Add caption

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at
least

threefold: to give man a chance to utilize and develop his
faculties; to

enable him to overcome his ego-centeredness by joining with other
people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for
a

becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this
view are

endless. To organize work in such a manner that it becomes
meaningless,

boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be
little short

of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than
with

people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of

attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.
Equally,

to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered
a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human
existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same
living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work
and the bliss of leisure.

From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of

mechanization which must be clearly distinguished: one that
enhances a

man's skill and power and one that turns the work of man over to a

mechanical slave, leaving man in a position of having to serve the
slave.

How to tell the one from the other? "The craftsman
himself," says Ananda

Coomaraswamy, a man equally competent to talk about the modern West
as the

.

.

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